The Abbess of Crewe (11 page)

They left, puzzled and bedazzled, having one by one and in many
ways assured her they had no intention whatsoever to discredit her Abbey, but merely to
find out what on earth was going on.

The Abbess, when she finally appeared on the television, was a complete success while she
lasted on the screen. She explained, lifting in her beautiful hand a folded piece of
paper, that she already had poor Sister Winifrede’s signed confession to the
effect that she had been guilty of exceeding wrongdoing, fully owning her culpability.
The Abbess further went on to deny rumours of inferior feeding at Crewe. ‘I
don’t deny,’ she said, ‘that we have our Health Food laboratories in
which we examine and experiment with vast quantities of nourishing products.’ In
the field of applied electronics, the Abbess claimed, the Abbey was well in advance and
hoped by the end of the year to produce a new and improved lightning conductor which
would minimize the danger of lightning in the British Isles to an even smaller
percentage than already existed.

The audiences goggled with awe at this lovely lady. She said that such tapes as existed
were confidential recordings of individual conversations between nun and Abbess, and
these she would never part with. She smiled sublimely and asked for everyone’s
prayers for the Abbey of Crewe and for her beloved Sister Gertrude, whose magnificent
work abroad had earned universal gratitude.

The cameras have all gone home and the reporters wait outside the gates. Only the
rubbish-truck, the Jesuit who comes to say Mass and the post-van are permitted to enter
and leave. After these morning affairs are over the gates remain locked. Alexandra has
received the bishops, has spoken, and has said she will receive them no more. The
bishops, who had left the Abbess with soothed feelings, had experienced, a few hours
after leaving the Abbey, a curious sense of being unable to recall precisely what
explanation Alexandra had given. Now it is too late.

Who is paying blackmailers, for what purpose, to whom, how much, and with funds from what
source? There is no clear answer, neither in the press nor in the hands of the bishops.
It is the realm of mythology, and the Abbess explains this to Gertrude in her goodbye
call on the green telephone.

‘Well,’ Gertrude says, ‘you may have the public mythology of the press
and television, but you won’t get the mythological approach from Rome. In Rome,
they deal with realities.’

‘It’s quite absurd that I have been delated to Rome with a view to
excommunication,’ says the Abbess, ‘and of course, Gertrude, dear, I am
going there myself to plead my cause. Shall you be there with me? You could then come
back to England and take up prison reform or something.’

‘I’m afraid my permit in Tibet only lasts a certain time,’ Gertrude
huskily replies. ‘I couldn’t get away.’

‘In response to popular demand,’ says the Abbess, ‘I have decided to
make selected transcripts of my tapes and publish them. I find some passages are missing
and fear that the devil who goes about as a raging lion hath devoured them. There are
many film and stage offers, and all these events will help tremendously to further your
work in the field and to assist the starved multitudes. Gertrude, you know I am become
an object of art, the end of which is to give pleasure.’

‘Delete the English poetry from those tapes,’ Gertrude says. ‘It will
look bad for you at Rome. It is the language of Cranmer, of the King James version, the
book of Common Prayer. Rome will take anything, but English poetry, no.’

‘Well, Gertrude, I do not see how the Cardinals themselves can possibly read the
transcripts of the tapes or listen to the tapes if their existence is immoral, Anyway, I
have obtained all the nuns’ signed confessions, which I shall take with me to
Rome. Fifty of them.’

‘What have the nuns confessed?’

The Abbess reads in her glowing voice over the green telephone to far-away Gertrude the
nuns’
Confiteor.

‘They have all signed that statement?’

‘Gertrude, do you have bronchial trouble?’

‘I am outraged,’ says Gertrude, ‘to hear you have all been sinning away
there in Crewe, and exceedingly at that, not only in thought and deed but also in word.
I have been toiling and spinning while, if that sensational text is to be believed, you
have been considering the lilies and sinning exceedingly. You are all at fault, all of
you, most grievously at fault.’

‘Yes, we have that in the confessions, Gertrude, my trusty love.
O felix
culpa!
Maximilian and Baudouin have fled the country to America and are giving
seminars respectively in ecclesiastical stage management and demonology. Tell me,
Gertrude, should I travel to Rome by air or by land and sea?’

‘By sea and land,’ says Gertrude. ‘Keep them waiting.’

‘Yes, the fleecy drift of the sky across the Channel will become me. I hope to
leave in about ten days’ time. The Infant of Prague is already in the bank —
Gertrude, are you there?’

‘I didn’t catch that,’ says Gertrude. ‘I dropped a hair-pin and
picked it up.’

Mildred and Walburga are absent now, having found it necessary to reorganize the
infirmary at the Abbey of Ynce for the ailing and ancient Abbot. Alexandra, already
seeing in her mind’s eye her own shape on the upper deck of the ship that takes
her from Dover to Ostend, and thence by train through the St Gothard the long journey to
Rome across the map of Europe, sits at her desk prettily writing to the Cardinal at
Rome. O rare Abbess of Crewe!

‘Your Very Reverend Eminence,

Your Eminence does me the honour to invite me to respond to the Congregational Committee
of Investigation into the case of Sister Felicity’s little thimble and
thimble-related matters …’

She has given the orders for the selection and orchestration of
the transcripts of her tape-recordings. She has gathered her nuns together before
Compline. ‘Remove the verses that I have uttered. They are proper to myself alone
and should not be cast before the public. Put “Poetry deleted”. Sedulously
expurgate all such trivial fond records and entitle the compilation
The Abbess of
Crewe
.’

Our revels now are ended. Be still, be watchful. She sails indeed on the fine day of her
desire into waters exceptionally smooth, and stands on the upper deck, straight as a
white ship’s funnel, marvelling how the wide sea billows from shore to shore like
that cornfield of sublimity which never should be reaped nor was ever sown, orient and
immortal wheat.